While there are those who love spreading the TikTok moral panic, a hack at the US treasury tells a rather interesting story.
Throughout the year, we’ve seen no shortage of news stories pushing the moral panic that TikTok is a Chinese mind controlling device made to take funny cat video’s and hypnotize people to do the bidding of the Chinese communist party. Or, as many reports more recently call it, “security concerns”. The claims were always bullshit nonsense from the beginning given a complete lack of evidence associated with these claims. Even members of the security establishment, who are part of pushing these conspiracy theories, have admitted before Congress that the security concerns are purely hypothetical.
Still, that didn’t stop one court from making the batshit crazy ruling that government censorship is free speech while ruling that the TikTok ban is lawful. That case is, unsurprisingly, now before the US Supreme court with, oddly enough, Donald Trump pushing to reverse the ban.
Of course, punching a massive hole in the story was the story about how China hacked AT&T by compromising the wiretap system supposedly only “good guys” can use. It was the October surprise that caused the TikTok conspiracy theories to stand still. So, unsurprisingly, the story was quickly swept under the rug as it completely undermined several conspiracy theories. The two main ones being that you can backdoor a system so that only good guys can access information and that the only threat from China is through TikTok. What’s more, solving such a system involves implementing a federal level privacy law which lawmakers seem completely allergic to doing. So, really not a surprise that the story quickly got buried so the mainstream media could go back to blaming TikTok for Chinese foreign interference.
Well, those TikTok conspiracy theories took another significant body blow recently. That came in the form of yet another hack that has been sourced to China. That involves the hacking of the US Treasury where documents have been stolen. From the BBC:
Chinese state-sponsored hackers broke into the US Treasury Department’s systems earlier this month and were able to access employee workstations and some unclassified documents, American officials have said.
The Treasury Department deemed the breach a “major incident” after disclosing it via a letter notifying lawmakers to the incident.
The US agency said it had been working with the FBI and other agencies to investigate the impact of the hack.
China denied any involvement, calling the accusation “baseless” and saying it “consistently opposes all forms of hacking”.
Gee, if China can get everything they want through TikTok mind controlling, why are they going around hacking all these targets in the first place? It seems like it would be a waste of time if those conspiracy theories were to hold up. It’s almost as if TikTok would be a very low value target in the grand scheme of things. After all, what is the Chinese government going to do with the information that you like funny cat videos anyway?
Much like the AT&T story, I expect this story to eventually get buried before the mainstream media goes back to their default conspiracy theories of “blame TikTok” over Chinese foreign interference and international espionage. It doesn’t really solve anything that’s in the people’s interest, but it is a favourite past time for the media and the government at least.
Still, it’s funny to see how much reality could care less about the gut feeling of certain individuals.
